We unexpectedly became foster parents in June and looking forward to adopting the sweet little girl that we are caring for. We treat her as our own documenting what happens as we would if she was born into our family so that we have those memories like we would for any other child. This is one of the two main reasons that we are starting this blog to update on our experiences throughout the process for insight and encouragement.

The short story is that we always wanted to adopt, but were planning on adopting after we had our own kids and ironed out some of the kinks of parenting…but those were our plans, not God’s.

In late fall of 2015 we took an evening trip down to Sikeston to have Lambert’s for dinner. The purpose of this evening was to give us a couple solid hours each direction as well as a hearty dinner to get to hear each other talk more about how we would like to see our family grow and develop. Honestly, this was a great time and since we gave ourselves an enough time to settle into our thoughts and openly discuss them we were able to have a unified vision for our ‘family planning’…so I thought.

The plan we discussed was that we were going to save up our money over the next two years savoring the moment as a Dual Income No Kids (DINK) household to put us in a better financial place for kids.  More exciting than that we were hoping to go backpacking in Europe for a couple weeks in the summer of 2017 with some of the money that we saved up. It was going to be our last big hurrah before trying to have kids. I was bought into this vision, I have wanted to go to Europe for a while and loved the idea of being spontaneous making as many memories as a newly married couple without kids.

but…

Emma started praying in such a way that was different from our family planning vision. She didn’t think that she would be able to change my mind and thought that we had a good plan, but that plan didn’t involve her having a baby for another two and a half years, and she wanted one now. So she started praying “God please just have someone drop a baby off at our door.” Can you believe that? How audacious!

People don’t really do that in the 21st century though do they? I mean we weren’t registered foster parents or licensed respite providers, how could that even happen?

Kinship placement.

This is just an introduction to what happened. Emma will share the story about how it all went down and she “got her way” when God answered her prayer.  Check it out in our next post: The Phone Call That Started Our Path to Parenthood.